A study of the lives of Christopher Gadsden (1724-1805) and Henry Laurens (1724-1792) is much more than a look at the contributions of two important, though largely neglected, heroes of the Revolution. Indeed, in these two lives, one can trace the development of the Revolution in South Carolina. Either Gadsden or Laurens, sometimes both, figured prominently in every major development in South Carolina between 1760 and 1783.

"Drawing extensively upon Gadsden's writings and letters, Christopher Gadsden and the American Revolution ... recreates the ... life of South Carolina's foremost patriot during the American Revolution and illuminates further that major episode in American history. The book contains all the known details of Gadsden's personal life as well as a thorough analysis of his political and military careers"--Jacket.

In what is probably the fullest and most vivid extant account of the American Colonial frontier, The Carolina Backcountry on the Eve of the Revolution gives shape to the daily life, thoughts, hopes, and fears of the frontier people. It is set forth by one of the most extraordinary men who ever sought out the wilderness--Charles Woodmason, an Anglican minister whose moral earnestness and savage indignation, combined with a vehement style, make him worthy of comparison with Swift. The book consists of his journal, selections from the sermons he preached to his Backcountry congregations, and the letters he wrote to influential people in Charleston and England describing life on the frontier and arguing the cause of the frontier people. Woodmason's pleas are fervent and moving; his narrative and descriptive style is colorful to a degree attained by few writers in Colonial America.

This comprehensive study highlights the importance of legislative and extralegal committees in the political and institutional development of early American history, showing how the colonial experience modified a basic British institution, using it in the cause of legislative supremacy and, eventually, independence. The book illuminates the role played by committees in the growth of colonial self-government, tracing the committee system to its origins in the parliamentary committees of medieval England, then following the permutations of the committee system through the decades in which self-government emerged in South Carolina. Solid, penetrating, the book offers new depths of insight into an important process that had vital importance to the growth of representative government in America.

Anthony Benezet (1713-84), universally recognized by the leaders of the eighteenth-century antislavery movement as its founder, was born to a Huguenot family in Saint-Quentin, France. As a boy, Benezet moved to Holland, England, and, in 1731, Philadelphia, where he rose to prominence in the Quaker antislavery community. In transforming Quaker antislavery sentiment into a broad-based transatlantic movement, Benezet translated ideas from diverse sources—Enlightenment philosophy, African travel narratives, Quakerism, practical life, and the Bible—into concrete action. He founded the African Free School in Philadelphia, and such future abolitionist leaders as Absalom Jones and James Forten studied at Benezet's school and spread his ideas to broad social groups. At the same time, Benezet's correspondents, including Benjamin Franklin, Benjamin Rush, Abbé Raynal, Granville Sharp, and John Wesley, gave his ideas an audience in the highest intellectual and political circles. In this wide-ranging intellectual biography, Maurice Jackson demonstrates how Benezet mediated Enlightenment political and social thought, narratives of African life written by slave traders themselves, and the ideas and experiences of ordinary people to create a new antislavery critique. Benezet's use of travel narratives challenged proslavery arguments about an undifferentiated, "primitive" African society. Benezet's empirical evidence, laid on the intellectual scaffolding provided by the writings of Hutcheson, Wallace, and Montesquieu, had a profound influence, from the high-culture writings of the Marquis de Condorcet to the opinions of ordinary citizens. When the great antislavery spokesmen Jacques-Pierre Brissot in France and William Wilberforce in England rose to demand abolition of the slave trade, they read into the record of the French National Assembly and the British Parliament extensive unattributed quotations from Benezet's writings, a fitting tribute to the influence of his work.

An examination of eighteenth-century evangelicalism and Anglican establishment in the lowcountry South